


As Through Fire

by sixpences



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-29
Updated: 2009-01-29
Packaged: 2017-10-03 03:07:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixpences/pseuds/sixpences
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Escaping the flames. Very short gapfill for 'One Son'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As Through Fire

_If the work is burned, the builder will suffer loss; the builder will be saved, but only as through fire._  
\- 1 Corinthians 3:15

At some point she is fairly certain he will give her some directions, to some safe-house or hideaway he has secreted hereabouts, but until then she will just keep driving, out of the county, out of the state, out damn spot and away into the night's lengthening shadow. Streetlamps flicker like fire at the edges of her vision, and they are alone on the road, the headlights bearing them westwards.

His hand twitches restlessly on his thigh, fingers fumbling for nicotine. She considers letting him fuck her again whenever they get to wherever it is they're going; it seemed to work in her favour the previous times, and she's certainly had less pleasant experiences. Perhaps there's something vaguely Elektral in moving from the son to the father but she's long since given up on maintaining any semblance of respectability, visible or otherwise. It's not as if it will matter when the sky starts falling.

The headlights catch a flash of some animal's eyes at the roadside before it ducks away, and she wonders if Fox will look through the bodies in the hangar for her, call in his partner and her test tubes and speculum to file and categorise blackened remains.

She had been surprised to discover that Fox and his little half-Irish wolfhound really aren't sleeping together; she'd had him fixed on her in '91, as she'd intended, but she never expected to leave such a lasting impression. Fox has always been a sucker for a woman who can outwit him, and once you get past the arrogant nose and irritating self-righteousness Dana Scully seems to have brains enough, even if she is wound up tighter than a watch spring. But it strengthened her hand a little, and that is never something to complain about.

The flare of his lighter seems to surprise them both, and out of the corner of her eye she watches him watching the flame before he dips the end of the cigarette into it. She had met him like that, the flicker of light stilling to toxic embers in a dark room, when she was eight years younger and decades more naive. Somewhere across the city Fox had been jittering about on that foul couch over the first small scraps they'd dug out of the FBI's most inaccessible storage rooms, while she had coughed on smoke and seen the façade of the universe torn open to reveal the horrors underneath. She had recoiled from spilled gas at a filling station on their next case and only got Fox to shut up about it by shoving him into over-bleached motel sheets and quieting his restive mouth with her own.

She knows why she was recruited, of course; for all the reasons that they didn't try to do the same to Scully. Her first night in Tunis she lay awake in the thick, warm darkness and the only thing she could think about was ratting out Amy Cockerell for cheating on a tenth grade Calculus test. It still wouldn't surprise her to learn he had that incident hoarded away in a file somewhere, next to a blood sample and her step-brother's home address.

"Take the next left," he says out of the gloom, and turns to flick ash out of the window. She shifts her hands on the steering wheel, ten and two. After the first time, in a better hotel room than most FBI agents would ever see on one of Berlin's less fractured streets, he had told her she could call him Carl; it wasn't his real name any more than 'sir', which she had stuck with. Fox calls him 'the Cigarette-Smoking Man' and she supposes that's probably truer than anything else he's gone by over the years. There is something about his very presence like tar in the lungs, choking, poison in the night.

The headlights flare over a road sign and she turns left across the empty lanes, more faceless tarmac spreading out ahead in the gleaming white light. She's not sure what to expect of the future beyond where the beams fade into the darkness. Her skin is stretched tighter over her knuckles than eight years ago, but it's still intact, and after that it's not like there's much else that matters on this doomed little sphere.

Once upon a time she had imagined herself a heroine, a seeker of justice and truth. It's almost as laughable as having been convinced she was in love with Fox, too. She had cared for him, certainly, and she would still rather not see him dead or broken or any other fate that his father might have saved up for a rainy day, but then and now she would step back from the bullet, let him fall if it might leave her standing. There are practicalities to be considered. There always have been.

He pushes the spent end of the cigarette out of the window; it flutters briefly in the rear-view mirror like a dying spark before it falls behind them, lost in the slipstream. The car rumbles on into the static night, approaching perpetual motion. The blood is singing in her veins.


End file.
